


Jilting

by hellkitty



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 05:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11373825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: Peggy comes to terms with her brother's death, and her own life.  And Fred.





	Jilting

Peggy was a little surprised--unpleasantly so--that Fred had chased her down. It wasn’t that she was awfully hard to find--the training ground’s location at Sandhurst was easily available to the Home Office. It was just...well, honestly, she’d been hoping to avoid it, hoping the letter she’d written had explained it all. There was nothing more to say, or at least, she couldn’t think of anything more to say to him. 

And new words weren’t forthcoming, now, sitting across from him at the cantina’s table, two cups of ersatz coffee threading steam between them. 

“Peg,” Fred said, in the voice she’d always labeled as Eminently Reasonable--the voice he used when trying to explain something to his man. He spread his hands on the table, for a moment, looking at his shined nails. “Grief is a funny thing, they say.” 

“They.” She bit down on a voice she knew would sound shrewish, demanding exactly who ‘they’ were and why anything they said mattered. 

“Well, and me,” Fred said, the mouth flickering for a second into his schoolboy’s smile. Still charming, still having that ability to hook something in her belly. “My father, for example.” The smile faded. “You know, after the Great War.” 

She remembered his father--staring intently, like a dog waiting an angry master, into the dawns and dusks of the days, no matter how bright the company, or how potent the brandy. Stand-to, she’d learned, those times when the enemy was most prone to attack. 

“I don’t quite see the connection, Fred.” His name seemed so...normal and yet no longer, like a lost prize, familiar on her lips and yet tasting stale. 

“He thought--as you do--that if he could make himself unhappy enough, then he could make up for his friends who had perished,” Fred said, taking a sip of the weak coffee, trying to wash the thought away. “Or, I suppose, he could not feel guilty for being happy.” 

“That’s not what this is, Fred.” A little more heat in her voice. 

“Then what is it? What is it other than punishing yourself--and me!--for your brother’s death?” It was clear he felt himself to be an innocent. 

She flinched at the word. Death. It tasted bitter on the tongue, still. She could still see the coffin, plain brown, military issue; she could still hear her mother’s wail as she fell to her knees by the gravesite, handkerchief crammed against her mouth, knowing she wasn't acting 'proper' or 'reserved' but unable to care. Death wasn’t just death, it was loss, a slow spreading poison that stained memories, drilled holes in lives of those left. Beneath the table, she felt her hands bunch into fists--not fists of anger as much as trying to squeeze down on emotion. She would not cry in front of Fred. She would not! 

“That is not what I am doing.” She almost didn’t recognize her own voice, brittle and hard, so unlike the giddy laugh she’d been unable to hold back when he’d proposed to her, or the ‘Margaret, mind your manners’ voice her mother had drilled into her as a child at the tea table. 

“Then what are you doing? Because I don’t understand it.” 

She wasn’t sure she understood it herself, to be honest. It was something that felt right, something that had bloomed in her mind and heart the instant she got the news of Michael’s death, not as the ‘right’ thing to do, but as the ‘only’ thing to do. “Fred, what would you have me do?” 

“Marry me!” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. It was the most obvious thing in his world, at least. “Marry me, leave that grim office at Bletchley Park. It’s a change of scene you need, Peg, and Tattersby will fix you up.” 

Tattersby: his family’s estate in Lincolnshire. There had been a time it had felt like paradise--the gentle roll of fields of wheat, open space under a wide china-blue sky. “This,” she said, firmly, “is a change of scene.” And it was true--Michael seemed to lurk around every corner of her family’s house--her big brother tugging her plait, the way he stood proudly in his too stiff, too new uniform, in the kitchen doorway, a thousand other memories. She could almost breathe him in, there. Here, the air seemed clear of that; she didn’t see him darting from her periphery. She didn't want to forget, but she couldn't bear to remember, all the time. 

“But are you sure--do you really know what you’re getting into? Peggy, I’ve seen the reports. SOE work is….” The well-manicured hands spread again, and she could see his signet ring catch light from the bare bulbs overhead. “What if I were to read your name on one of those reports? How could you expect me to do that? How could I tell your mother?”

Him. Him. It was always about him, it seemed. And her mother. That had been a low blow, as the Americans said. Because it would devastate her mother to lose both her children, yes, but that was...she couldn’t allow herself to think of that, right now. And it was vile of him to put the idea in front of her. 

Or at least those were the twigs of the argument she drew to herself, to kindle up that heat against him. Because she couldn’t allow herself to think that he might be hurt, that she might die and leave a void in his life, as Michael had in her family’s. It was too much, and she pushed it away, knowing, even as she did, that it was more than a little unfair. 

But, as the Yanks also said, life was unfair. 

“Come home, Peg,” Fred said, taking her silence for the weakness it probably was. “Come back to London with me and we’ll sort all this out.”

Sort it out, as though it was some school issue, mistake she’d made that he would ride in and fix for her, like a knight, shining in his armor and all. 

And Peggy knew there was a time when she would have fallen ever deeper in love with him for it, for the strength in his posture, his confidence and self assurance. Fred Wells was a man who knew his way through the world, the kind of man, with charm and good looks, and, yes, kindness, had glided through his years in public school on his easy smile. He dazzled, and she had been dazzled. 

She’d wanted to be a hero, as a young girl, but she’d grown up, and had begun to think that maybe all she’d really wanted was to be near a hero, to bask in his glow, be the helpmeet that stood by him. 

But Fred was no hero. Michael had been a hero, brave and honorable and modest, with a less brazen, quieter confidence. “There’s nothing to sort out, Fred,” she said, and this time she heard the sorrow in her voice, not for her own situation but a sort of strange, general sadness that Fred was not the man she’d wanted him to be, and that it was unfair of her to have expected him to be other than he was. He was a golden boy, a golden man, beloved of his father, keeping himself safe out of duty to his father. He was a good man. Just not the man for her. 

She had her own duty--to Michael and to herself. She gathered herself and some dignity together. “I am quite fine where I am.” 

“Fine?” Almost a laugh in his voice. “Peggy, you can’t possibly be fine. You can’t possibly know what you’re doing, what you’re getting into!”

“I know quite well, Fred. I know well enough, and I’ll thank you not to treat me like a child.” She knew enough, but all that mattered was that it was her choice, even if the magnitude of her choice frightened her. Better fright than despair. Better doing something than sitting at home amid livestock and the Wells cutlery. 

He huffed, a sharp exhale of air. Fred picked up the coffee mug, then put it down again without taking a sip. It was the most discomfited she’d ever seen him. “How can you do this to your mother?” 

“You leave my mother--my entire family--out of this, please.” She was on her feet before she knew it, and the coffee slopped over the edges of the tin mugs from the force of it. “I did not ask you to come down here, Fred. My mind is quite made up and I have no intention of regretting my own life.” 

He rose, slower, and with the grace he’d always had, as if he were merely standing because a lady came into the room. “I swear, Peggy, that I’m not entirely sure that I recognize you. Losing your brother has…,” his hand fluttered, “unhinged you.” 

“Unhinged me?” She hated the shrill note in her voice, but it was too much, too outrageous an accusation. “Lieutenant Wells, I am afraid that I have nothing further to say to you. On this matter or any other,” she added, for good measure. 

“I see,” he said, after a long moment, though she had no idea what it was he saw. All she could hear was the sudden chill in his voice, aloof and cutting. “I dare say, Margaret Carter, that I am glad I discovered this….irascible and reckless temper of yours before I made the egregious mistake of linking my family to yours.” 

It was so unfair and unkind of him. She felt that pang in her belly turn to ice, brittle enough to crackle through her, hurt, even if the words, his accusation, gave her what she wanted--freedom. Was it true? Did she have a temper? 

She didn’t want to think of that right now, either. She wouldn’t have had to get so cross, so vexed, if he’d just stayed away, if she’d let her last words in her letter (“Please understand, my dearest Fred, and if not understand, then at least forgive your Peggy”) be the last words between them. He’d pushed, and now they’d both muffed it. She squeezed her eyes shut over sudden tears, trying to will them away, and feeling them heavy on her lashes as she opened them again. “I am glad for you, Fred. I wish you every happiness.” She was so dreadfully awful at farewells. And this was more than that, this was a goodbye, a final severing. 

She’d held some thin hope, somehow, that he’d stick with her, he’d wait for her till the war ended, and they could pick up their lives and build a future together, when there was a future to be built. She hadn’t even realized that she’d bundled that dream away, in lavender sachets and scented paper, with her wedding dress, until now. Put away for one day, some day, to be brought out when safe, when settled. 

That day wouldn’t come, at least not with Fred. They were puzzle pieces and for a while, she’d turned to the side that fitted against him, into him, making a cozy picture of domestic peace--a home, like the one she grew up in, in the country, children tumbling over green hills and gardens. But she had turned, now, and she didn’t fit into him anymore, and it was no use trying to jam the pieces together. 

“I’d wish you the same,” he said, donning his service cap with an air of finality, as though he, too, were shaking out the crumbs of some dream. “If I thought you had any notion what happiness was.” 

It was delivered with the biting coolness of the scion of the Wells family, clipped and haughty. He turned on his heel, walking out. And all she could notice for a moment was that he’d left the coffee cups on the table, a man used to having servants to tidy up after him. 

But then the words seemed to soak in, suddenly, and she sank down onto the battered metal chair again, as if her knees were mutinying, turning against her. Because maybe he was right, maybe she didn’t know what happiness was. She was a puzzle piece looking for a picture to complete. All she knew now was that she’d never find it with him, and all that mattered now was that she could do something, anything, to win the war that had blasted all their lives.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I read an article when Season Two of Agent Carter was out, where the author, a purported feminist, raged at the idea of a Peggy Carter who might, just possibly, have wanted to get married, settle down, and all that stuff. It...kind of pissed me off, because the whole point of feminism is, ya know, about NOT judging women for their choices? And I don't think a Fred Peggy could fall in love with could be THAT detestable and shallow. 
> 
> Anyhoo, here's a bridge fic--Peggy comes to terms with Michael's death in her own way. I wrote it ages ago, for a mini big bang that suffered from modflake. Cleaning out the old gdocs and I figured, yeah, may as well, right?


End file.
